Keyword research often gets treated like some mysterious, technical skill reserved for SEO specialists, but the honest truth is that it starts with something far more human. It starts with the actual words your customers use, not the words your business tends to use internally. Getting that gap closed properly is most of the battle, and the rest is simply using the right tools, and the right thinking, to confirm and expand on it.
Start with how your customers actually talk, not how you talk
Businesses often describe themselves using internal or industry language that customers rarely search for. A joinery business might think in terms of “bespoke fitted furniture,” while a customer is far more likely to type “custom wardrobes near me” or “built in wardrobe cost.” The starting point for genuinely useful keyword research is stepping outside your own vocabulary and thinking honestly about the exact words a real customer, with no industry knowledge, would type into Google when they have the problem your business solves. A useful exercise here is simply writing down every question a customer has ever actually asked you, in their own words, whether that was over the phone, in an email, or in person. That list alone is often a genuinely strong starting point.
Understand what the person actually wants, not just the words
A keyword on its own only tells you part of the story. What matters just as much is the intent sitting behind it. This idea has a proper academic foundation, going back to a widely cited 2002 paper by researcher Andrei Broder, which first formally classified web searches into three types, informational searches, where someone wants to learn something, navigational searches, where someone is trying to reach a specific site they already have in mind, and transactional searches, where someone wants to actually complete an action, like buying something or booking a service. This framework still underpins how most SEO professionals think about intent today. Someone searching “what is a wet room” is almost certainly informational, gathering knowledge before making any decisions. Someone searching “wet room installers near me” is transactional, ready to actually hire someone. These two searches might sit in the same general topic, but they call for completely different content, one wants an explainer, the other wants a service page with a clear way to get in touch.
Do not ignore long tail keywords
There is a natural temptation to chase short, broad terms because they carry the biggest search volume, but these are also usually the most competitive by a wide margin. Independent research from SparkToro, which analysed 332 million real search queries collected over 21 months, found that the long tail of search is far longer than most people assume, with hundreds of thousands of search terms appearing only once across the entire study period, and the wider pool of low frequency, highly specific searches making up a genuinely significant share of overall search activity. A generic term like “accountant” is genuinely difficult for a small local firm to compete for. A more specific phrase like “accountant for sole traders in Leeds” has a much smaller pool of searchers, but a far higher proportion of them are genuinely relevant to your business, and considerably less competition standing between you and them.
Use your own site’s real data first
If your website has been live for a while, you already have real, first party evidence of what people are searching to find you, and this is genuinely worth checking before reaching for any external tool. Inside Google Search Console’s Performance report, the Queries tab shows the exact search terms that have shown your site in results, along with impressions, clicks, and average position for each one. It is worth sorting this list by impressions specifically, since a query showing lots of impressions but very few clicks often signals a genuine opportunity, people are searching for it and seeing your site, but something about the listing itself is not persuading them to click through yet.
Add local modifiers where they genuinely apply
If your business serves a specific area, building location into your keyword thinking from the start makes a real difference. This does not mean stuffing your city name into every sentence unnaturally, it means genuinely considering how someone nearby would phrase a search, whether that includes the town name directly, a regional term, or simply relies on “near me” and their device location doing the work instead.
Avoid the most common mistake, targeting one keyword everywhere
A common trap is trying to target the exact same keyword across several different pages, hoping to improve the odds of ranking. In practice this usually backfires, since it can confuse search engines about which page actually deserves to rank for that term, and often results in both pages performing worse than a single, clearly focused page would have. It is far more effective to map out your core topics first, assign each one to a single dedicated page, and let related but distinct phrases naturally spread themselves across your wider content rather than competing against each other.
Bringing it together
Good keyword research is not really about clever tools or secret tricks. It is about genuinely understanding how your real customers talk and what they actually want at each stage of their search, backed up by real behavioural data rather than guesswork, and refined using whatever first party evidence your own website has already collected.
Sources referenced:
- Broder, A., A Taxonomy of Web Search, ACM SIGIR Forum (2002): https://sigir.org/files/forum/F2002/broder.pdf
- SparkToro, New Research: We Analyzed 332 Million Queries Over 21 Months: https://sparktoro.com/blog/new-research-we-analyzed-332-million-queries-over-21-months-to-uncover-never-before-published-data-on-how-people-use-google/
- Search Console Help, How Are You Performing on Google?: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/10268906?hl=en
